The Master Butcher's Singing Club (6 page)

Fidelis took satisfaction in the fact that the dog, doted on by the Kozkas, made his way across the town to visit him. One day he showed up at the Waldvogels’ killing chute, his black eyes clever in a ball of bristling rust brown fur, a sneer on his velvet muzzle. Hottentot was granted all the scraps he could gulp, and then Fidelis gave him a huge cow bone and sent him back to Pete. That would have been all right if that was as far as Fidelis had taken it, but Fidelis had a teasing streak and did not know when to quit. Day after day the dog showed up, and Fidelis amused himself by providing it ever more gruesome skeletal remains—skulls, femurs, ribs. The spinal column of a heifer, trimmed out meticulously to allow the ligaments to maintain articulation, was the pièce de résistance that overthrew the Kozkas’ patience. When Hottentot dragged it proudly through the Argus streets, pausing here and there to gnaw a bit or improve his grip on the thing, everybody in the town got wind of what was going on—literally. The bones were ripe, and the warm and sunny entrance of the shop, where Hottentot brought it to chew on for half the morning, reeked by the time Pete discovered it.

Swearing, he bent over the dog to grab away its prize. When Hottentot growled menacingly, Pete grabbed the dog’s ears and forced his head back. “Just you try that,” he warned. “You’ll be a skin on the wall.”

“Save that thing,” said Fritzie, her arms folded in the doorway, “I’ve got an idea what to do with them. And tie up the dog.”

The dog was attached with a rope to the clothesline pole, but Hottentot was of a studied cleverness that made him impossible to control. By midafternoon, he chewed through the rope and returned to Fidelis to beg an evening meal. He was home by dark with a set of hooves roped together with tasty sinew. Pete chained him next, but Hottentot wound the chain until the links popped and was back at the Waldvogels’ place by morning. When Pete found his dog on the front stoop again slavering over an oozing boar’s skull, he was enraged past good sense. Grabbing for the skull, he put his arm in the way of Hottentot’s teeth. His arm was torn so savagely that Doctor Heech had to see him and closed the gash with no less than ten stitches. Heech also advised him to shoot the dog right on the spot. Most men would have walked home and done so, but Pete Kozka did not blame Hottentot. He believed that his dog’s loyalty had been corrupted by Fidelis.

“We’ll see, we’ll just see about it,” he muttered to himself that night, planning what he would do to get even with the man he’d taken in right off the street and hired and who now, as he decided to see it, had turned against him and even stolen the affections of his dog.

FIDELIS WAS NOT
a religious man, except when it came to his knives. First thing every morning, after he’d taken his strong coffee from Eva’s hand and eaten his breakfast of cheese and bread and stewed prunes, he visited the slotted wooden block where his knives were kept. He took them out one by one and laid them in strict order on a flannel cloth. These were the same knives he’d brought in the suitcase with the sausages, from Germany, and they were of the finest quality—forged from the blade to the tang in a mold and then worked from spine to cutting edge to create a perfectly balanced tool. Fidelis kept them ferociously clean. He examined each for any minute sign of rust. Then he made what for him were the day’s most important decisions: which blades needed only to visit his sharpening steel, and which, if any, were
in need of the graver attention of the stones. Most often, the knives required only the steel.

Fidelis’s long sharpening steel, now kept on an iron wall hook, was the same one that hung from his belt in the portrait that his parents had paid the finest photographer in Ludwigsruhe to take when he mastered the family trade. With a musical alacrity, he swiped across the steel the knives whose edges needed minimal attention, and then he set them back into the block. Fidelis was conservative. He never oversharpened, never wasted good steel by grinding it away. But a dull blade would mash the fibers of the meat and slip dangerously in the hand, so when a knife needed a fresh edge, he was ready. He removed the set of stones from a drawer beneath the wooden block, and then he arranged them in order next to the knife that waited on the flannel. The coarse black stone was first, to set the cut right, and then the stones became finer. There were six in all. The last was fine as paper. By the time Fidelis finished, his blade could split an eyelash.

Every morning, after the boys had left for school and after his ritual with the knives was accomplished, Eva opened up the store and went over the day’s schedule. While she was doing this, Fidelis habitually retired to the toilet at the back of the house, where he parted his hair with a surgical precision, combed it back, shaved meticulously, obeyed the prompting of the stewed prunes, and drank another cup of hot coffee. He had enlarged this toilet room, or bathroom, and made it comfortable in the German way. His family had always kept soft rugs and cheerful plants near the plumbing, as well as ashtrays and tobacco, books and newspapers on a shelf within easy reach. Over the tub, there hung an array of cleaning implements: a brush with a handle of polished maple wood to scrub the back, a smaller and brisker brush for the fingers, a large pumice stone for callused feet, and a tiny, hair-soft, blue-handled brush for the face. There was also a stash of soaps, from the harshest lye soap to the French-milled lilac ovals that Eva used. These soaps were kept in a square cedar box with a slatted floor to drain away excess water, so the soaps would last. Next to the tub on another wooden shelf,
behind curtains made of ticking material, towels were stacked—the cloth worn thin, but bleached to a sunny whiteness. The entire room was painted a pleasant yellow, and, as its wide glass block window faced southeast, it caught the morning light. It was the comfortable and generous sort of room that would lead a person to think the Waldvogels were wealthy. They were not. It was Eva’s doing. She had a knack for saving money and making a good effect out of nothing.

One summer morning after all of these small but essential rituals were accomplished, Fidelis began the primary business of that day—he was to kill a prize sow belonging to the Mecklenbergs and de-create her into rib chops, tenderloin, hams, hocks, pickled feet, fatback, bacon, and sausages. The sow had spent the night in the holding pen and was at present in a rage of hunger. For the first time in her life her morning squeals did not bring a bucket of slops. Instead, of course, she would be killed. The pig was more intelligent than the dog, Hottentot, who waited just beyond the fence to snatch whatever of her was left after the humans took her apart. The pig would certainly have learned a great deal from the coming encounter, but pigs get only one chance to experience the great perfidy of humans. And the betrayal is so swift and final that it comes upon each one of them as though it were the first ever to suffer such a surprising fate. Still, as this sow was perhaps smarter than most, she had more than an inkling that things were not right. Perhaps other sows and boars before her had written final messages in scent. Perhaps she read the avid air of Hottentot. Or maybe the entire unprecedented situation made her uneasy and then more belligerent than usual, because, when Fidelis entered the pen with his 32-20 rifle, which he intended to press directly to her skull, she trotted, huge on tiny legs but still surprisingly agile, to the opposite side of the pen.

From there, she eyed the man, who carried no food, with bleak suspicion. Fidelis cursed in exasperation, and called Franz to help him drive the pig up the chute, where she would be confined, killed, winched into a tub for scalding, scraped, cooled, split, and eviscerated. Knowing all that was to come, Hottentot began a maddened, frenzied barking that set the pig into a rage of horror to escape. Poked through
the fence by Franz’s stick, she minced forward a few nervous steps. Fidelis jumped behind her and let out an awful bellow that was meant to drive her into the narrow confinement of the chute. She didn’t go there, but cleverly circled all the way around the pen to a place, this time, where no stick from behind would reach. There she stood her ground, shuddering, understanding now that something was very wrong. The comfortable life she’d led so far had not prepared her for the strangeness of the situation, but her prize-winning heritage made her cunning. Fidelis prodded sideways at her, but she moaned savagely back at him, and evaded his kick. He spent his breath chasing her through the muck. He slipped, covered himself in slime, swore viciously, recovered. Fidelis rushed at the pig, flapping his apron. Startled, she sidled away. He got the upper hand by continuing to flourish the cloth, mystifying her, driving her where he wanted her to go. Then suddenly she entered the chute and he slammed down the gate.

Fidelis then made the mistake of clambering over the side of the chute, carrying his rifle, and dropping into the confined area along with the pig. He touched down lightly on the other side. As he turned to face the sow, meaning simply to walk up to her and kill her as he’d done with so many others, she charged him. Screaming, she bolted down the narrow incline, broke his kneecap with her crooked brow, and sank her teeth into the flesh just above. As she ripped down, shredding Fidelis’s canvas trousers, and skin to bone, Fidelis gave an anguished roar that, along with the shrill, keening attack shrieks of the pig, brought Franz bolting to the side of the chute. For one endless moment he thought that the sow, whose clenched teeth had parted when Fidelis brought the butt of his rifle down upon her head, would close in again and devour his father. She did have the advantage. While Fidelis lurched back trying to turn the rifle around to shoot, the pig charged again, destroying what was left of his knee with another lurching bite. She then repaired to her corner, red-eyed, bleary with hatred, sobbing. And all this time the eager barks of Hottentot, hungry, goaded her, as though the dog were capable of communicating to the pig a twisted fatalism. She tried to charge again, but this time Franz managed to jam a board between
her and Fidelis. Temporarily thwarted, she backed off and in that moment of hesitation Fidelis was able to push the barrel of his gun between her eyes and pull the trigger.

There was a huge blast of noise, which delighted Hottentot and dazzled Franz. The sow collapsed with a murmur of sorrow, and straightway Fidelis hobbled over to chain her to the winch and haul her to the iron tub. As he did so, a sudden strangeness boiled up in him, a load of nameless feeling unconnected to his physical pain. This was mental, it was sorrow, he wanted to lie down in the muck and weep. Hot tears poured in a shocking stream from his eyes and dripped down his face. Abruptly, he ordered Franz away. He was bewildered, since he had not cried since he was a boy, and even during the war hadn’t broken down like this. But in spite of his attempt to control himself, he wept, angry at his helpless grief, and was all the more horrified to realize that he wept for the sow. How could that be? He had killed men. He had seen them die. His best friend had died beside him. No tears. What sort of man was he to weep, now, for a pig? Angry, he stayed with the creature after that, tending to every detail of her butchering. Although his knee was an agonizing rip of information—he knew it would never be the same—he kept moving. If he stopped to let the knee stiffen, he would be crippled, he thought, and so only late into the afternoon did he quit and then only because Eva forced him. His last act before leaving for Doctor Heech’s office was to provide Hottentot with the stomach of the pig and a huge intestinal wad that the dog, unable to eat all at once, dragged back home.

SITTING ON
A sheet-covered bench in the examining room, Fidelis absently hummed a mocking song to take his mind off the agony in his knee. “
Ich bin der Doktor Eisenbart
.” Heech raised his sleek brows, frowned, and said, “I know that song. ‘
Ich mache dass die Blinden gehen und dass die Lahmen wieder sehen
.’” Fidelis tried to laugh but the sound came out a gasp. The lame will see, the blind will walk. He’d bound his knee, tight, in an apron and used the strings to secure the improvised bandage.

“Let’s see what you’ve done now,” muttered Heech, cutting the
knotted strings. Fidelis almost asked Heech to save the apron, but realized that Heech would have ignored him, or even taken it as an insult. With sure hands, the doctor unwound the mutilated fabric, and sighed when a thick flap of Fidelis’s flesh stuck to the last fold. “A miracle of engineering,” he shook his head. He was prone to lecturing. “Kaput.” A favorite word of his. Heech frowned in concentration and began a close examination of the wound. The doctor had beautiful hair, of which he was slightly vain. Thick and glossy curls flopped down over his forehead. He loved anatomy and his walls were decorated with painstaking watercolors of the muscles, bones, and digestive and reproductive systems, pictures that he himself had painted. As he assessed Fidelis’s shattered knee and the ripped musculature that had kept the cap in place, he planned how to fix the rips and tears just as a woman does when thrown a half-destroyed pair of boy’s pants. Fidelis was looking at his own knee, too. His thoughts were different. They were a butcher’s observations. Here, he’d slice. There, he’d skin, use the edge of the knife, the point. In no time he’d have a modest dinner joint with just enough fat to lard the meat. Fidelis banged his skull with his hand to clear it and nearly passed out. The song he’d been singing to himself screamed in his brain. Heech helped him to lie back on the bench.

“Breathe,” said Heech, “but do not pass out on me.” He fit an india rubber cup over the butcher’s face.

Fidelis plunged into a dry, spinning, spark-infested faraway place from which he knew, heard, and even felt all that Heech did with his needle. Nothing bothered him, although he knew in the abstract that Heech’s every move was painful. It made things worse that the doctor hummed annoyingly while he sewed, but his bedside manner was unpredictable, the whole town knew it. Sometimes he scolded, sometimes he wept, and sometimes, as now, Heech seemed to enjoy his work in an undoctorly way. As he stitched, he burst into the maudlin “Aura Lee.” Fidelis grew intrigued with the tune and began to pick it up. He sang the chorus with Heech, then Heech started over again so that Fidelis could learn the verses. Once he started singing, nothing worried Fidelis, although it was clear from the extent of the damage that he might be crippled. Nothing
angered him, either, for he’d taken out his embarrassed and sorrowing rage on the sow by slicing her up with a savage precision. The song did please him, as it pleased Doctor Heech, so that by the last note and stitch they were quite friendly and Heech kept him fifteen minutes longer as he sketched out a brace that would allow Fidelis some range of motion while keeping the knee in place until it healed.